


Give my voice to the river

by ncfan



Series: Legendarium Ladies April [27]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Abandonment, F/F, Gen, POV Female Character, Tumblr: legendariumladiesapril, legendarium ladies april
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 21:56:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18374849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: It took Mithrellas longer than it might have others to recognize their separation for the abandonment that it was.





	Give my voice to the river

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the April 3rd [poetry prompt](http://legendariumladiesapril.tumblr.com/post/183912085402/legendarium-ladies-april-prompts-for-april-03), _Untitled_ by Noor Ibn Najam (Full text in endnote).

At first, her remaining by the river’s banks seemed practical, innocuous. It would keep her from getting lost, and oh, Nimrodel had loved the rivers and streams of Ennor; surely she would not stray too far from it, either. Mithrellas knew not the name of this river, and it spoke in a strange tongue unlovely to her ears, but it was still a river with a bank that alternated soft sand with smooth stones, and Nimrodel had loved rivers. Mithrellas had loved rivers, and she thought that maybe, just maybe, if she could follow the current down to the Sea, she would find Nimrodel there.

She asked questions of the water, and the water never answered her in any terms she could understand, but sometimes she saw something in the depths that she thought might be fire (the fell fires of Hadhodrond? The ghost fires of long-ago-burning Dagorlad? The sunlight, or some specter of disaster yet to befall the land?), saw no sign of Nimrodel, and never saw her own face reflected out of the rushing torrent. Riddles and more riddles, leading her downstream to answers she liked less with every moment that trickled by.

They had fled fires. They had been fleeing fires all their lives. Their parents had carried them as tiny girls out of what had once been whole Ossiriand and now was mangled Lindon. Many of the Lindi had fled east over the mountains, and east over further mountains, and there two sets of parents had carried two small girls into the sanctuary of Lindórinand, where it seemed as though strife had never touched the world. Where it seemed as though no one had ever looked up into the night sky and seen it bleeding red and orange and deathly gold.

(Gold. Oh, what fools did all who walked the earth turn into over their treasures.)

But the Ñoldor and the Sindar had come, and they had brought trouble with them. They applied their names to the valley, and Lindórinand seemed to have a new one every year; Mithrellas had ceased bothering to keep track of them after the first five or so. The names were irritating, but ultimately they could be ignored, especially if you followed the path Mithrellas and Nimrodel had, and kept to the Lindi, and avoided the Sindar and the small pockets of Ñoldor who had made the Lindi’s home their home. The Hadhodrim had dwelled in their mountain since long before Mithrellas ever walked the forests of her home, and they had brought their troubles with them, too.

They had fled fires. She and Nimrodel had fled, and the Sindar prince had found them and offered them a safe place, far across the Sea. Nimrodel had agreed to it, and how could Mithrellas do anything else? Her parents had refused the call, so long ago, but there was no safety left in Ennor, no peace to be found in her home, and what else could she do but flee further than she ever had before?

They fled.

And fled.

Were separated.

And fled.

Were separated again.

Mithrellas had sworn to always stay by Nimrodel’s side. Once, long ago, Nimrodel had sworn the same.

It took longer than it might have others, for Mithrellas to regard their final separation deep in the forests of the Ered Nimrais as the abandonment that it was.

The worst of it was that Mithrellas could not even say for sure how they had become separated, how she had been abandoned here, in foreign lands so far from her home where even the rivers did not speak to her in any tongue she could decipher. Her memory of the moment of abandonment was muddled, all deafening noise and flashes of silver hair disappearing deeper into the forest. Mayhap it had not been malicious. Mayhap Nimrodel had not meant to leave her here alone.

So many ‘mayhaps.’

Not a single one of them were a balm to the burn on her soul.

She poured her desolation out to this foreign river, trading her weeping and her raging for the terrible crashing of the rapids that could only have presented her with catharsis if she had thrown herself in and let her body unfurl and become the water that crashed upon the rocks. She screamed and the river screamed back. They never did understand each other.

Names and words and spirit’s blood were gouged into the sand, so deep that sticks struck gravel and broke in two in the ruts. It was gibberish, all of it; the letters rearranged themselves before Mithrellas’s very eyes, arched letters turning to sneers and shadows squirming into jeers. What would a mortal child exploring the mountains make of this? Mithrellas had never seen a mortal child. Perhaps they would look at her diatribes and see only the unintelligible ravings of the mad.

Or nothing at all. The river surged forth greedily to swallow the words scored into the sand, obliterating them one line at a time. Mithrellas screamed and kicked and slapped at the water and it only roared nonsense back at her. Though some quality had changed, she thought. Or else her ears deceived her, and if her heart had deceived her so long ago, it was hardly out of the question that her ears might do just the same.

It wasn’t a deception, though.

Grief had blunted the edges of Mithrellas’s mind, even as it had honed her heart to a blade sharp enough to cut her lungs and viscera to ribbons. She noticed things later than she ought. She didn’t notice when her hands and feet were raw with blood and stinking pus. She didn’t notice nausea until the moment her mouth was flooded with sour bile. All the while, she was screaming to the river, and the river was screaming back, and she would never know the moment their voices began to mingle.

They did, though. How could they not, when there was no one for Mithrellas to speak to but the river, and no one for the river to speak to but Mithrellas? All they ever heard was each other, voices always striving to master the other. Mingled and mingled, and grew confused, until strains were knotted together and it was inevitable that—

One day, when sunlight beat down on Mithrellas’s back like a lash, the river spoke to her in a clear, quite voice, dead to all emotion:

“My love has gone away. My love has left me to founder in the wilderness.”

And when Mithrellas opened her mouth to reply, all that came out was the roar of rushing water.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Ered Nimrais** —‘The White Mountains’ (Sindarin); the name is derived from _ered_ ‘mountains’ and _nimrais_ ‘white-peaks; pale-horns.’ The mountain range that separated Gondor and what was originally the Calenardhon, later Rohan.  
>  **Hadhodrond** —the Sindarin name for Khazad-dûm, derived from the elements _Hadhod_ (a Sindarin rendering of the Khuzdul _Khazâd_ ), and _rond_ , meaning ‘cavern.’  
>  **Lindi** —the name by which many of the Green-Elves referred to themselves, adapted from 'Lindai', a form of the term 'Lindar', which many of the Teleri used to refer to themselves during the Great March from Cuiviénen, and the name that the Falmari still use to refer to themselves (Nandorin)  
>  **Lindórinand** —‘Vale of the Land of Singers’ (Nandorin); one of the original names given to Lothlórien by its first, Nandorin inhabitants.
> 
> Poetry Prompt: _Untitled_ , by Noor Ibn Najam
> 
> No matter the rush of undertow  
> everything else is still  
> here. I scrawl your name  
> at the bottom of the river  
> I sing it and it sings me  
> back. What I’d give for a name  
> so keen it whittles  
> the valleys of my neck. I’m forever drenched  
> in this night, and you  
> no longer exist. The river catches  
> the sky’s black, ink  
> meant to preserve a memory. I stay  
> because it’s easy. Here. I relive  
> what you did to me, find myself again  
> in the water—swollen and sullen  
> as a bruise. I trace  
> and retrace, graffiti  
> every river’s bank, drown  
> into ecstasy  
> instead of moving on with my life.  
> I wear what you did to me  
> like gills, a new way to breathe.  
> I jump into the river  
> for days. I forget I have lungs at all.


End file.
